NYTimes.com - Game Theory: Exploring Meaningful Violence.Instead of feeling transformative or powerful, however, violence in
BioShock Infinite felt gratuitous. Why, I wondered toward the end, am I
endlessly pumping rockets into the screaming, magically levitating ghost of
my sidekick’s mother? Why must every room fill with fleets of replicant bad
guys I am forced to kill with a spinning hookblade? Am I supposed to find
this horrifying, or cool? I felt inundated with so much ridiculous,
anonymous shooting that it was difficult for me to care about any of it.

Mad Max RW wrote on Dec 29, 2013, 21:34:So what am I supposed to do? Every time I'm critical of liberals I have to add that I also support gay marriage and the legalization of pot? It's ridiculous.

The NYT is a liberal establishment. This is fact. I used their own words to back it up and you and others attack me because I didn't add those caveats making sure I'm not some Fox News obsessed right winger so it must not be true, right? You have been so completely manipulated it's hysterical how easily I can predict everything you're going to say.

I attacked you because you made a dumb ass one-liner in a vain attempt to show wit. If you throw a stinkbomb, you don't get to complain when people call you an asshole.

Are most NYT journalists more liberal than your average Red State Republican? Yes, that is beyond dispute. Yet, so is any other journalist, for the most part, because it comes with the profession. Furthermore, just because someone is politically liberal doesn't mean their journalism is inherently biased -- the studies on media bias show that the overwhelming majority of mainstream media outlets have a balanced number of ideological sources, i.e. you hear the perspective of rightwing assholes and leftwing assholes in equal numbers, to include that liberal rag from New York. Are NYT editorials stridently liberal? Absolutely, yet their actual reporting conforms to mainstream media norms of unbiased journalism, and their broader opinion page has a pretty strong diversity of real reasoned opinion from all ideological bents. So should we always read our information critically, particularly when there is the possibility of bias? Yes. Is the NYT so biased as to justify being dismissed out of hand? Absolutely not and anyone who suggests so, to include yourself, is a buffoon.

Mad Max RW wrote on Dec 29, 2013, 20:15:I don't get how you still think I'm a right winger when multiple times on this site I said I'm not a registered Republican or a member of the Tea Party and have proven to be equally critical of previous administrations over the years.

Because you mouth right wing rhetoric as if it is the the soul of wit and then in a follow up post you complain that the Republican party isn't conservative enough? You may be neither a Republican or active Tea Party member, but the ideas you argue for are certainly right wing.

So what am I supposed to do? Every time I'm critical of liberals I have to add that I also support gay marriage and the legalization of pot? It's ridiculous.

The NYT is a liberal establishment. This is fact. I used their own words to back it up and you and others attack me because I didn't add those caveats making sure I'm not some Fox News obsessed right winger so it must not be true, right? You have been so completely manipulated it's hysterical how easily I can predict everything you're going to say.

Mad Max RW wrote on Dec 29, 2013, 20:15:I don't get how you still think I'm a right winger when multiple times on this site I said I'm not a registered Republican or a member of the Tea Party and have proven to be equally critical of previous administrations over the years.

Because you mouth right wing rhetoric as if it is the the soul of wit and then in a follow up post you complain that the Republican party isn't conservative enough? You may be neither a Republican or active Tea Party member, but the ideas you argue for are certainly right wing.

I don't get how you still think I'm a right winger when multiple times on this site I said I'm not a registered Republican or a member of the Tea Party and have proven to be equally critical of previous administrations over the years. This stuff drives me nuts. If you're critical of a liberal president you are a racist right winger. If you were critical of a conservative president, especially right before and during a major war, you're an unpatriotic traitor. This is the kind of bullshit the mainstream media dug itself into a hole so deep they will never escape. The NYT's continued profit loss is a good enough indicator. MSNBC's and CNN's record low ratings. All these liberal journalists are eating it now.

Anyway, the Republicans of today are only slightly less drunk on the idea of bigger government compared to their Democratic counterparts. I'm hopeful when I see Tea Party Republicans pissing off their party's establishment by offering up something different by actually following the Constitution. Bitching about them doesn't make sense to me when the establishment was, is, and will forever be the source of our problems. Where's the alternative in the Democratic party? In the next few months and years the liberal media you pretend doesn't exist or matter will feed us a narrative that Hillary is that alternative. I'll bet the majority of people here will eat it right up and ask for more.

But hey, if you want to continue living as an ignorant child be my guest. It amuses me.

Stopped reading Put my fingers in my ears after you showed your hand as yet another internet puppet grown up. One day (when you are a grown up everyone knows now cool I am) you'll realize how wrong you were in your youth as a liberal student regurgitating the same nonsense and lies. to get educated and not talk in stero types.

Stopped reading after you showed your hand as yet another internet puppet. One day (when you are a grown up) you'll realize how wrong you were in your youth as a liberal student regurgitating the same nonsense and lies.

One, I'm not a student -- finished that quite a while ago now -- and if you read my post history on this site which goes back to 2002, you'll discover that when I WAS a student I tended to be quite conservative. Regardless, my general perspective of the world is generally colored by themes which are associated with the right -- I would describe my outlook on politics as basically a sort of Thucydidean tragic realism. People change over time as they acquire new experiences, and their ideas change with them. Frankly, as time has gone one, the Republican Party, of which I amazingly am still a registered member, has shown its philosophy of government to be completely counter to the democratic ideals which animate my own politics, and furthermore their policy ideas are no longer animated by sober realism, as it was in the Republican party of my parent's generation, but by ideological fantasy which ignores all empirical experience.

And if I was rude, then tough shit. That's the attitude right wingers seem to like these days -- "Don't like what I say? Too fucking bad." -- except when it gets directed towards them, at which point they turn into self-made martyr pussies -- "Oh my god, the violation of my freedom of speech (nevermind that no legal action is being taken against me for my words)!"

Stopped reading after you showed your hand as yet another internet puppet. One day (when you are a grown up) you'll realize how wrong you were in your youth as a liberal student regurgitating the same nonsense and lies.

Get over yourself, teabagger. There is a big difference between acknowledging bias and reading critically, and dismissing a source out of hand because of said bias and living in blissful ignorance. If bias, however small, is enough to ignore something, shouldn't we all just ignore you? After all, both of your comments in this thread suggest you've definitely got the right-wing blinders on.

The simple reality is that certain professions attract certain mindsets of people -- for example, if you believe that poor people are scum and moochers, and deserve their misery, then you probably aren't going to go into social work -- and, lo and behold, journalism tends to attract people who are more liberal. Yet, American journalism has as it's central professional ethical tenet balanced, non-prejudicial reporting. To be honest, journalists pursue this ethic almost to a fault, resorting to "Democrats say such and such, yet Republicans counter with..." presenting both sides as having equal merit even when "one side of the story" clearly doesn't have a factual leg to stand on. Nevertheless, this is how reporting is done in America, and as a result, bias really isn't the issue most partisan hacks think it is. The best objective way to measure bias is by the balance of sources cited -- if a journalist always cites liberal sources, then he is biased, and vice-versa -- and on that count, the mainstream media does a pretty damn good job of living up to its professional ethic.

If you genuinely think the "lamestream media" is so fucking biased, then it's probably an issue of the world refusing to conform to your own narrative rather than actual biased reporting. For examples, the left is pretty upset about how Obamacare has been reported on, claiming that the rollout has been made to look worse than it has really been, but the simple reality is that the rollout has been a fucking disaster. There are upshots sure, and the law isn't valueless, but anyone that thinks Obamacare looks bad because of bias doesn't have their fucking eyes open.

A NYT editorial once said something I disagree with, therefore the whole newspaper is just liberal propaganda. I know because Fox told me so!

Even the NYT admitted they have a liberal bias. It's common knowledge IF you read. But the liberal internet warriors on Blue's News lack such basic understandings. Bury you head in the sand and deflect to Fox instead. Predictable. You are especially ironic when the interview I linked first aired on CNN. I'm sure you were already aware of it, right? Being such avid readers of the NYT you wouldn't want to sound like you missed something important.

Now instead of acknowledging they have a liberal bias and I am *gasp* right again, desperately find a way to deflect. Or better yet, take the coward's way out and ignore.

Man as a liberal I gotta say that if I did all the stuff that nutjobs accuse me of doing, I'd have no time to do important things like burn the flag, rape baby abortions while smoking dope and plotting the overthrow of the US with George Soros by waging a war on Christmas with the Kenyan Nazi Communist Socialist Totatlly-not-the-president-but-president who happens to be black.

saluk wrote on Dec 29, 2013, 03:03:I have to agree. The setting and story don't really support the level or manner of violence, and it weakens the game as a whole because of it. When a game has very clear "bad" guys, who are all out to get you, like The Last of Us (and of course, zombie games tend to be the braindead easiest to make gameplay and story cohesive), killing them is the most obvious, and in most cases, only viable choice.

When placed in an environment like Columbia, a "working" civilization in which we are meant to believe real, living, non zombie, flesh and blood humans grow up and live there, I don't know maybe I'm silly to think this, but the gameplay boiling down to killing every last one of them with nary a decision in the matter at any time (oh I can choose HOW to kill them), just seems wrong somehow.

It walks the line well enough to not actually OFFEND me, or most gamers. But it's certainly a bit off putting for some people. I don't think the author of the article wanted Infinite to be an adventure game exactly, but context matters - and infinite is an example where the context does not give any real weight to the experience.

Except that Booker is an *extremely* violent person. We learn this in the museum. He's the most violent man a war veteran general has ever known. We establish that he's so violent that it creeps people out.

Spoilers:And that violence and world-weariness play into Elizabeth's loss of innocence. Remember, her tears are a sort of "wish fulfillment" according to her. So the first world tear is into a highly romantic dramatic world that looks "Just like Les Mis" as E puts it. But as Booker's wariness and violence and cynicism pile up on her, the worlds she jumps to become bleaker and bleaker, reflecting her world view. At the end she literally jumps to a world where the ghost of her estranged "mother" haunts her literally, where all there is is violence, and she secretly I think blames Booker for it, because her wish fulfillment in the final world jump has killed off Booker.

So for me the violence was actually balanced against the storyline. Not to mention the metaphoric commentary on US history. We have this jingoistic view of ourselves as the Shining City on the Hill. Columbia is the embodiment of that. Columbia is actually the goddess/female personification of the US. Which suggets in BI that the city is the essence of America. And so in the game, Columbia is extremely violent under it's cotton-candy appearance.